The IBM InfoSphere Roundup from the 2008 IOD Conference

Better late than never! Here is a review of InfoSphere events at the IBM Information on Demand Conference in Las Vegas last month.

I find it hard to blog at these conferences with wall to wall conference and social events each day so I'm a couple weeks late with this post. You can read my previous conference posts on product roadmaps. A large part of the IBM Global Information on Demand Conference at Mandalay Bay is de ja vu. Weren’t we at the same conference in the same place twelve months ago? And didn’t Intel have an ice bar at the Information Server Community Drinks?

Well okay, so we were at the same conference, at the same hotel (Mandalay Bay) at the same community drinks and the Intel ice bar did seem to have miraculously stayed frozen, in Las Vegas, for twelve months. Except it wasn’t the same Community Drinks. Back then it was called Information Platform and Services and this year it just had the name InfoSphere – a brand name instead of a conglomeration of words that belong together.

An ice bar is about as sensible as Oracle’s metadata strategy, glasses and bottles slide right off it and you get wet when you lean against it. But IBM had version 2.0 of the ice bar. They had someone suspended on wires pouring vodka into a global – presumably the global IOD globe, with the water drizzling down through various ice sculptures into a glass.

And there were prawns everywhere, you couldn’t spin around without seeing a plate of prawns.

And we were in no ordinary bar, it was no ordinary Mandalay Bay ballroom. This was the InfoSphere demo room and it had one of the most central locations in the conference with fancy red carpet and a massive entryway. It was the premier demo room of the conference. The conference had more attendees this year, up from about 6,400 last year to 7,250 odd this year once you count the late comers. So with a bigger InfoSphere brand with Cognos inside and extra people the InfoSphere demo room was a popular place all week. The free soft drinks and chocolate bars didn’t hurt.

At the community drinks there were people sloshing around drinks and staggering past expensive demonstration machines with every piece of InfoSphere software on display. Apparently this is the type of environment that InfoSphere software works best in. InfoSphere software demonstrations look really good through beer goggles.

InfoSphere had the biggest and best demo centre at the conference and it also had the best Community Reception. The drinks were still going two hours after the start and apparently around the corner at the Content Management reception they had only basic beer and that ran out after one hour and the place emptied out.

If Community Reception budget is anything to go by then InfoSphere is a hot brand in IBM at the moment and Content Management can wait in line.

So yes, there was de ja vu, but there was also a feeling that last year the Information Server was a stupidly named piece of niche software that was struggling to get noticed amongst all the other IBM software. This year InfoSphere was one of the stars of the show. It had some press releases and was mentioned in the keynote and later in the week it had it’s own keynote in the 12,000 seat Mandalay Bay Arena but under 1,000 people in attendance. Not as many as the thousands who showed up to the major keynote with Martin Short.

There was a ten minute demo of end to end InfoSphere products from metadata through to BI reporting that was made up of mostly live software demonstration on the big screen while “actors” on the stage talked the audience through the steps. The evidence that a new data mart can be built from conception to delivery in a single morning is both impressive and screwed up – imagine that much power in the hands of the average IT team.

One of the problems with launching InfoSphere this year is the Highlander Effect. The first Highlander film was good with French actor Christopher Lambert butchering a Scottish accent so badly that you could no longer tell he was French and Sean Connery earning a handy pay packet. Highlander II was the sequel that was written into Sean Connery’s contract, they had to find a way to bring him back to life and the story was so appalling that when they came to make Highlander III they had to pretend Highlander II never existed and picked up the story line from the original movie.

Information Server metadata tools are kind of like Highlander III. Let’s pretend release 8.0.1 didn’t really happen and all these 8.1 metadata tools are like new, and call them InfoSphere Foundation Tools:

Metadata Server, Workbench, Information Analyzer and Business Glossary are joined by Rational Data Architect (now possibly renamed to InfoSphere Data Architect) to become these Foundation Tools. They are not exactly new, it’s just a new name and a new release.

Also new was that a data integration tool can work in tandem with a business intelligence tool:

Again not exactly new – both products have Metadata Integration Technology Inc (Miti) metadata bridges which means Information Server metadata can be imported into Cognos and Cognos metadata can be imported into the Information Server for Workbench reporting since release 8.0.1. In Information Server 8.1 and Cognos 8.4 this gets better – a couple extra menu options in Cognos can directly call Workbench or Business Glossary to ask for technical or business metadata on the column or data selected. In the old days DataStage used to work equally well with any BI tool and database platform. Now Cognos is being given the edge. I think IBM would be better off opening up these menu options to any data lineage of business glossary tool – it would make Cognos more competitive. But for now these two menu options are hard wired to the InfoSphere products.

So InfoSphere launched something old, something new, something borrowed and it was all big blue.

They also launched InfoSphere “Flex” Offering:

In a first for IBM it will make IBM business software easy to access if you don’t have a product license. It works thusly – you buy one InfoSphere product and IBM gives you the whole lot. After twelve months you pay for only for the products you deployed to production. You get to juggle and jumble and remix your original selections – so if you bought too many CPUs of one product you can swap some of the capacity for another product. If you decide you didn’t like the profiling tool but you got attached to the Business Glossary you can switch.

The catch is once you deploy to production you have to have license it. If you only use what you planned to use then it should be covered by your original license fee. If you bought too much power – too many CPUs for example, you can downsize that product and bring add in another product. If you decide after taking a look at the software that your users don’t like the profiling tool but like the sound of the glossary tool you can do a swap. IBM obviously hope that you like a lot of the software they give you and you end up paying for a whole lot more at the end of the 12 months!

Would you like to supersize your InfoSphere? It’s just an additional 55 cents.

I like the idea of Flex. I’ve seen people buy the IBM data integration suite in the past and get the wrong mix of products up front – or discover they have massively oversized the number of CPUs – so this lets them change the mix of software and get much better value for money.

IBM like that “Flex” name – they are also using FlexLearning -

What is FlexLearning?
FlexLearning from IBM InfoSphere is an interactive web-based learning environment which allows students to learn by doing through a rich system of guided, hands-on exercises and self-assessment questions.

You’ve got the entire InfoSphere software suite on DVD and you’ve got every online training course that goes with it.

The FlexLearning Site License grants access to ALL available FlexLearning courses for an entire year

You get the idea – you buy one or more InfoSphere products and you get every product to try out, you buy on FlexLearning site license and you get 3 hour online tutorials on most of the InfoSphere products so you are more likely to try them out during your initial 12 months.

IBM didn’t cause as much fuss at this conference as Steve Jobs at an Apple event or Larry Ellison showing the new Oracle Database Machine to 40,000 odd people watching from a hall and monitors around San Francisco – but they did make it into the New York TImes with IBM set to discuss 'Information Agenda' and in heaps of IT magazines.

The Information Server is now riding on the coat tails of the InfoSphere – it’s embedded into just about every InfoSphere product and the metadata Foundation Tools are going to get a higher profile and a bigger development budget going forwards. Crucial to the success of InfoSphere are the new versions of the Information Server, Cognos, Industry Models and MDM Server which have more “accelerators” or synergy points.

So for me this was the best IOD so far – the InfoSphere sessions and demo room were a lot of fun – I hardly had time to gamble.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

Vincent McBurney is an IBM Information Champion for Information Integration.

3 Comments

There was a lot of great information at the conference, but here's a tip for next year's conference - bring a digital camera and capture all the slides yourself. The slides for most of the presentations are not available on the IOD web site. While I wrote some notes, I missed a lot of good information. One example is the TSB-1001A "Expert: Mastering Database Connectivity with InfoSphere Information Server" session. The presenters gave a lot of recommendations and information that I wanted to review back at the office when I could check it against my system. Unforunately, that presentation cannot be downloaded so all I have now is my notes. What is the value of information that can't be reviewed after the conference?

May 4, 2009

LOL Dude. I don't agree with better late than never. IBM has successfully made a rather slow and buggy product even slower and with more bugs. I don't get it! And, I would certainly like some of this cash for mass marketing a bad product. And, seeing what IBM has done to the product, never would have much better.

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Vincent McBurney is an IBM Champion for Information Integration and has been blogging for many years on InfoSphere software and ...
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Vincent McBurney is an IBM Champion for Information Integration and has been blogging for many years on InfoSphere software and competitors in Information Management, Governance, Data Integration and Data Warehousing.
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